Games People Play: The Basic Handbook of Transactional Analysis. Pdfdrive com

3 · THE GENESIS OF GAMES
From the present point of view, child rearing may be regarded as an educational
process in which the child is taught what games to play and how to play them.
He is also taught procedures, rituals and pastimes appropriate to his position in
the local social situation, but these are less significant. His knowledge of and
skill in procedures, rituals and pastimes determine what opportunities will be
available to him, other things being equal; but his games determine the use he
will make of those opportunities, and the outcomes of situations for which he is
eligible. As elements of his script, or unconscious life-plan, his favoured games
also determine his ultimate destiny (again with other things being equal): the
payoffs on his marriage and career, and the circumstances surrounding his death.
While conscientious parents devote a great deal of attention to teaching
their children procedures, rituals and pastimes appropriate to their stations in
life, and with equal care select schools, colleges and churches where their
teachings will be reinforced, they tend to overlook the question of games, which

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form the basic structure for the emotional dynamics of each family, and which
the children learn through significant experiences in everyday living from their
earliest months. Related questions have been discussed for thousands of years in
a rather general, unsystematic fashion, and there has been some attempt at a
more methodical approach in the modern orthopsychiatric literature; but without
the concept of games there is little possibility of a consistent investigation.
Theories of internal individual psychodynamics have so far not been able to
solve satisfactorily the problems of human relationships. These are transactional
situations which call for a theory of social dynamics that cannot be derived
solely from consideration of individual motivations.
Since there are as yet few well-trained specialists in child psychology and
child psychiatry who are also trained in game analysis, observations on the
genesis of games are sparse. Fortunately, the following episode took place in the
presence of a well-educated transactional analyst.
Tanjy, age seven, got a stomach-ache at the dinner table and asked to be
excused for that reason. His parents suggested that he lie down for a while. His
little brother Mike, age three, then said, ‘I have a stomach-ache too,’ evidently
angling for the same consideration. The father looked at him for a few seconds
and then replied, ‘You don’t want to play that game, do you?’ Whereupon Mike
burst out laughing and said, ‘No!’
If this had been a household of food or bowel faddists, Mike would also
have been packed off to bed by his alarmed parents. If he and they had repeated
this performance several times, it might be anticipated that this game would have
become part of Mike’s character, as it so often does if the parents cooperate.
Whenever he was jealous of a privilege granted to a competitor, he would plead
illness in order to get some privileges himself. The ulterior transaction would
then consist of: (social level) ‘I don’t feel well’ + (psychological level) ‘You
must grant me a privilege, too.’ Mike, however, was saved from such a
hypochondriacal career. Perhaps he will end up with a worse fate, but that is not
the issue. The issue is that a game in statu nascendi was broken up right there by
the father’s question and by the boy’s frank acknowledgement that what he
proposed was a game.
This demonstrates clearly enough that games are quite deliberately initiated
by young children. After they become fixed patterns of stimulus and response,
their origins become lost in the mists of time and their ulterior nature becomes
obscured by social fogs. Both can be brought into awareness only by appropriate
procedures : the origin by some form of analytic therapy and the ulterior aspect
by antithesis. Repeated clinical experience along these lines makes it clear that
games are imitative in nature, and that they are initially set up by the Adult

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(neopsychic) aspect of the child’s personality. If the Child ego state can be
revived in the grownup player, the psychological aptitude of this segment (the
Adult aspect of the Child ego state) is so striking, and its skill in manipulating
people so enviable, that it is colloquially called ‘The Professor’ (of Psychiatry).
Hence in psychotherapy groups which concentrate on game analysis, one of the
more sophisticated procedures is the search for the little ‘Professor’ in each
patient, whose early adventures in setting up games between the ages of two and
eight are listened to by everyone present with fascination and often, unless the
games are tragic, with enjoyment and even hilarity, in which the patient himself
may join with justifiable self-appreciation and smugness. Once he is able to do
that, he is well on his way to relinquishing what may be an unfortunate
behaviour pattern which he is much better off without.
Those are the reasons why in the formal description of a game an attempt is
always made to describe the infantile or childhood prototype.